Courses

Courses at a glance

Sacramento Professional Facilitators is proud to present a variety of stimulating courses to enrich your skills. We specialize in imparting a unique method of facilitation called the Technology of Participation (ToP)®. We combine high quality materials with professional instruction to deliver the best value to you and your organization.

We emphasize skills, application, and reinforcement so that our customers leave a seminar with knowledge and skills that they can put into practice immediately. Our programs are integrated into your organization’s business approach so that your employees see how the training relates to their work environment.

Below are course highlights. Click on the course name to read more. Register by selecting the course and date from the course calendar at right.

ToP Facilitation Methods - Leadership Edition

Learn three proven ways to activate group participation – the focused conversation, consensus workshop, and action planning. All can be used alone or creatively combined. Hands-on practice helps you discover practical uses in your life and work.

ToP Strategic Planning

The ToP strategic Planning process builds on your learning form the ToP Facilitation methods course, showing you how to weave those methods into an integrated approach to strategic planning. The resulting plan is realistic, achievable, and easy to monitor.

Top Secrets of Implementation

Do your clients have difficulties sustaining a plan once it has been initiated? Do you sometimes have difficulties helping your clients stay on track, bring new people into a team and bring closure? This course is about keeping plans and projects alive, relevant, doable and achievable. There is a large and powerful component for peer mentoring in this course.

Accelerated Action Planning

Energize and align your team toward a common goal in the time it takes to have a regular staff meeting. Learn all the practical details that ensure a successful project. This process is especially useful for small teams of 4 – 10 members who are planning an event or project within the next few months

Approaches to Environmental Scanning

Before preparing an organization’s plans, the team needs to understand the history and current dilemmas, as well as anticipate trends. Environmental scanning provides a way to quickly tap into relevant factual data and customer, staff or community perceptions.

Facilitation for Innovation: Inspiring Group Creativity

Expand your skills to facilitate group creativity, innovation and strategic thinking. Experience exercises and receive a reference book of tools and resources that help a group limber up thinking, see a problem from many perspectives and find pathways for action.

Facilitation Graphics

Words communicate symbolically. Words married to visuals communicate more deeply and dramatically. There is a power in the visual – it shapes experience, refreshes, enlivens and deepens communication. Engage hands on in exploring materials, techniques and processes for developing a graphics library, organizing information visually and creating templates to use with your groups.

Power of Image Shift

Individuals, groups, and organizations sometimes need to rethink and adjust to the current reality. The Power of Image Shift course helps you to thoroughly understand the complexity and depth required in transformational change. This course provides tools to design facilitation or training sessions that result in effective change.

Social Process Triangles

The Social Process triangles provide a well-tested approach to analyzing the current reality for organizations and communities. For those working in local communities, businesses, government, issue campaigns, social networks, faith-based groups – both volunteers and public servants alike, the triangles can provide a simple and transparent tool for assessing and working with the dynamics of the situation.

ToP Focused Conversation Method

A ToP Focused Conversation is a facilitated group conversation that promotes inclusive and meaningful conversation through four structured phases of reflection: from the simple to more complex aspects of an issue. The process enables people to engage in a conversation of honest discovery where one speaks, listens to differing views, develops new understanding and perhaps even different perspectives through the process.